Creating Bus Timetables Under Stochastic Demand

Local bus network is the most popular transit mode and the only available transit mode in the majority of cities of the world. Increasing the utility of this mode which increases its share from urban trips is an important goal for city planners. Timetable setting as the second component of bus network design problem (network route design timetable setting vehicle assignment crew assignment) have a great impact on total travel time of transit passengers. The total travel time would effect on transit utility and transit share of urban trips. One of the most important issues in timetable setting is the temporal coverage of service during the day. The coverage of demand is an objective for setting timetables which has not been well studied in the literature. In this paper a model is developed in order to maximize the temporal coverage of bus network. The model considers demand variation during the day as well as the stochastic nature of demand. A distribution function is used instead of a deterministic value for demand. The model is then implemented to an imaginary case.